7 Places to Create Your Own Educational Games for Students to Play at Home

ProProfs Brain Games provides templates for building interactive crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, word searches, hangman games, and sliding puzzle games. The games you create can be embedded into your blog or shared via email, social media, or any place that you’d typically post a link for students. If you don’t want to take the time to create your own game, you can browse the gallery of games. Most of the games in gallery can be embedded into your blog.

ClassTools.net templates for creating map-based games, word sorting games, matching games, and many more common game formats.

Purpose Games is a free service for creating and or playing simple educational games. The service currently gives users the ability to create seven types of games. Those game types are image quizzes, text quizzes, matching games, fill-in-the-blank games, multiple choice games, shape games, and slide games.

TinyTap is a free iPad app and Android app that enables you to create educational games for your students to play on their iPads or Android tablets. Through TinyTap you can create games in which students identify objects and respond by typing, tapping, or speaking. You can create games in which students complete sentences or even complete a diagram by dragging and dropping puzzle pieces.

Wherever I’ve demonstrated it in the last year, people have been intrigued by Metaverse. It’s a free service that essentially lets you create your own educational versions of Pokemon Go. This augmented reality platform has been used by teachers to create digital breakout games, augmented reality scavenger hunts, and virtual tours.

There was a time when Kahoot games could only be played in the classroom and only created on your laptop. That is no longer the case. Challenge mode lets you assign games to your students to play at home or anywhere else on their mobile devices.

Apеster (https://app.apester.com/): can be played asynchronously (yet, restricted in time). Kahoot is a simultaneous game. EdPuzzle also lke Apester can be asynchronous, but like Kahoot requires an account, whereas Apester can be played by anyone.

If you search Twitter effectively, there are not only great resources but great people to help you teach differently and keep the classroom more entertaining. You can grow your own personal learning network.

Will remote workers be able to be seen and interacted with via their holograms (i.e., attending their meetings virtually)? What would this mean for remote learners?

Will our smartphones increasingly allow us to see information overlaid on the real world? (Think Pokémon Go, but putting that sort of technology into a vast array of different applications, many of which could be educational in nature)

How do/will these new forms of HCI impact how we design our learning spaces?

Will students be able to pick their preferred learning setting (i.e., studying by a brook or stream or in a virtual Starbucks-like atmosphere)?

Will more devices/platforms be developed that combine the power of AI with VR/AR/MR-related experiences? For example, will students be able to issue a verbal question or command to be able to see and experience walking around ancient Rome?

Will there be many new types of learning experiences,like what Microsoft was able to achieve in its collaboration with Case Western Reserve University [OH]? Its HoloLens product transforms the way human anatomy can be taught.

p. 22 Extensive costs for VR design and development drive the need for collaborative efforts.

Case Western Reserve University, demonstrates a collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic and Microsoft to create active multi-dimensional learning using holography.

the development of more affordable high-quality virtual reality solutions.

AR game developed by the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences [Austria] (http://www.fh-salzburg.ac.at/en/) that teaches about sustainability, the environment and living green.

Whether using AR for a gamified course or to acclimate new students to campus, the trend will continue into 2017.

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15 Tech Tool Favorites From ISTE 2016

Google ExpeditionsThis virtual reality field trip tool works in conjunction with Google Cardboard and has just been officially released. The app allows teachers to guide students through an exploration of 200 (and growing) historical sites and natural resources in an immersive, three-dimensional experience. The app only works on Android devices and is free.

FlippityThis app works in conjunction with Google Sheets and allows teachers to easily make a Jeopardy-style game.

Google Science JournalThis Android app allows users to do science experiments with mobile phones. Students can use sensors in the phone or connect external sensors to collect data, but can also take notes on observations, analyze and annotate within the app.

Google CastThis simple app solves issues of disparate devices in the classroom. When students download the app, they can project from their devices onto the screen at the front of the room easily. “You don’t have to have specific hardware, you just have to have Wi-Fi,”

ConstituteThis site hosts a database of constitutions from around the world. Anything digitally available has been aggregated here. It is searchable by topic and will pull out specific excerpts related to search terms like “freedom of speech.”

YouTubea database of YouTube Channels by subject to help educators with discoverability (hint subjects are by tab along the bottom of the document).

Zygote BodyThis freemium tool has a lot of functionality in the free version, allowing students to view different parts of human anatomy and dig into how various body systems work.

PixlrThis app has less power than Photoshop, but is free and fairly sophisticated. It works directly with Google accounts, so students can store files there.

uild With ChromeThis extension to the Chrome browser lets kids play with digital blocks like Legos. Based on the computer’s IP address, the software assigns users a plot of land on which to build nearby. There’s a Build Academy to learn how to use the various tools within the program, but then students can make whatever they want.

Google CS FirstBuilt on Scratch’s programming language, this easy tool gives step-by-step instructions to get started and is great for the hesitant teacher who is just beginning to dip a toe into coding.